A lot of people play with their cellphones or read while waiting for something. Jim Gurney, the creator of Dinotopia, paints small watercolors. (See my previous post about Jim’s painting of a mud puddle.)
I brought my car to the dealership for a service checkup. The service guy told me it would take about 45 minutes.
He pointed me to a waiting room, which had a coffee machine, some magazines, and a TV set. But I was tired of hearing about Romney and Obama. So I headed onto the sales floor. I found an empty chair next to the snack machine. I laid out my watercolor gear on a desk and got to work.
The hazy daylight streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Clusters of red, white, and blue balloons hung from the ceiling. A sports car sat in the middle of the room, its silver paint mirroring bright highlights from the windows.
The sales people seemed transfixed by their computers. One guy played digital solitaire. They took no notice of me. When I was finished with the painting, I showed it to them. They took photos of it with their cellphones to put on their Facebook pages.